Dvorak’s Little Mermaid-ish opera takes on a climate change bent in this new production. It’s stylish, but missing the story’s essential pain“You are my fairy tale,” the Prince says to water-nymph Rusalka, as he leads her away from her woodland home to his palace to make her his wife. And that’s sort of the problem.-ish opera is a tragedy of good intentions – two people swept up in fantasy who forget that you can’t live on rainbows and fairy-dust alone.
The climate crisis is the starting point for a sustainable staging that practises what it preaches. Rusalka’s forest-pool starts lush and green-fringed in Chloe Lamford’s striking set design, but by the time the rejected Rusalka flees back in Act III, it’s a dried-up and polluted slick. The fallen tree, whose branches initially embrace and hide Rusalka, becomes a design feature – now gilded and geometrically shaped – in the Prince’s sleek palace.
But whether we’re in Dvorak’s story or Hans Christian Andersen’s , this is a bodily fable – a tale not just of despoliation but pain, mutilation, violence. We don’t feel that here.